Google wants you to watch YouTube videos everywhere. Now you can watch geo-tagged videos inside Google Earth. Any video tagged with a latitude and longitude will show up when this new layer of Google Earth is turned on. So you can watch videos about the places you are exploring inside Google Earth.
It’s a good way to show videos in the context of where they were shot, and also gets more plays for videos that might have otherwise been lost in the YouTube vortex. Of course, people have been embedding YouTube videos in 2-D Google Maps for a while now. But that seems to require more of a manual process. I’d like to see all geo-tagged videos automatically pop up in a video layer on Google Maps as well.
Projects like this point to a day when the entire world will be tagged by its citizens—with videos and text and photos and hyperlinks. Add mobile maps to the equation, and the line between what is virtual and real will begin to blur. Imagine flipping open your phone to see how other people have tagged the spot that you are standing in (although, this is more a Google-Maps scenario than a Google-Earth scenario, at least until you can run Google Earth on a phone). It would be a great way to create travel video guides.